In 2006 the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra launched a project designed to help bridge past and present: It commissioned six composers to write companion pieces for Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51), works that were completed around 1720 and use a rich variety of instruments. The multiyear New Brandenburg Project had one condition: each composer had to use the same instrumentation as the Bach model. The result was new compositions by Aaron Jay Kernis, Melinda Wagner, Peter Maxwell Davies, Christopher Theofanidis, Stephen Hartke and Paul Moravec.

In 2012, Michael Christie and the Colorado Music Festival Chamber Orchestra performed Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto nos. 1, 3, and 6 along with the companion pieces by Kernis, Theofanidis, and Hartke. A 28 July 2013 concert at 7:30pm at Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder will present the remaining pieces in the two sets of compositions.

Paul Moravec, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Music, has composed over one hundred works for the orchestral, chamber, choral, lyric, film, and operatic genres. He is University Professor at Adelphi University, recently served as the Artist-in-Residence with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ., and in 2010 he was recently elected to the American Philosophical Society. His Brandenburg Gate, composed in 2008, is inspired by Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 in F Major, as well as by contemporary events in Germany. “The title, Brandenburg Gate, suggests a portal through which we enter Bach’s world of exuberant invention,” Moravec said in his program notes. “It also refers to the actual monument in Berlin, which I personally associate primarily with the astonishing images of the opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989.”

Melinda Wagner’s chamber works have been performed by the New York New Music Ensemble, Network for New Music, the Empyrean and Left Coast Ensembles, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and other leading organizations. She has taught at Brandeis University, Swarthmore College, Syracuse University, and Hunter College. She has lectured at many schools including Yale, Cornell, Juilliard, and Mannes, and has served as Composer-in-Residence at the Yellow Barn Music Festival, Monadnock Music Festival, Wellesley Composers Conference and the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival. Little Moonhead, inspired by Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 in G Major, includes a celesta in the instrumentation. Wagner says of her composition, “In Brandenburg no. 4, Bach puts into motion a relatively small number of voices, each presented in broad brushstrokes, through doubling. In addition to all of its lightness and air (and the delicacy provided by soloists), there is a kind of orchestral heft, along with pristine clarity. My own music tends to be much more dense, with many more voices, compound chords, and divisi strings. Ironically, . . . Little Moonhead sounds more like a chamber work, perhaps because my ‘brushstrokes’ are pencil-thin.”

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is an English composer and conductor and is currently Master of the Queen’s Music. He is a prolific composer who has written music in a variety of styles and idioms over his career, often combining disparate styles in one piece. Sea Orpheus reflects Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in B flat Major and takes its inspiration from a poem by George Mackay Brown, the Orcadian poet. Says Maxwell Davies: “There are three movements, played without a break, all based on a Gregorian chant, Tantum ergo Sacramentum, which is subject to constant transformation processes, and is present throughout in some form. The work has . . . flute and violin solos and a virtuoso keyboard part, taking full advantage of the modern grand piano.”

Bruhn, born in 1934, is the composer of scores from post-war German television and film, including an entirely original, funk-inspired soundtrack for an adaptation of the Japanese anime series, Captain Future, that enjoys cult status among popular music enthusiasts around the world.

While the greatest musical dynasties ruled over vast empires of the imagination, their geographic domains were small. The Couperins held the organist post at the church of St. Gervais in Paris for nearly two hundred years from middle of the seventeenth century to well into the nineteenth. For a still longer period legions of Bach relations spread out through the Lutheran heartland of central Germany like industrious musical beavers. Churches, court chapels, schools: these were the modest and often confining venues where the Bachs practiced their craft.

The reach of these august families is dwarfed by that of the most influential of all musical lines – the Newmans of Hollywood. Not yet extending across as many generations as the clans just mentioned, this movie-music dynasty rules the multiplex and therefore the world.

Whereas the most august of the Couperins and Bachs produced some of the monuments the Baroque, from elegant and profound keyboard pieces to monumental vocal works, the Newmans have given the world countless soundtracks and orchestrated even more. J. S. Bach produced more than two hundred cantatas in a handful of years, but the greatest of the Newmans – Alfred the Indefatigable – was still more prolific. This Newman’s career spanned Hollywood’s Golden Age, from City Lights of 1931 (Chaplin himself wrote the score; Newman was his music director) to the star-studded flames of Airport released in 1970, the year of the composer’s death. What is the majesty of the Mass in B minor (BWV 232) as against Newman’s most familiar (and perhaps shortest) piece – the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, that proudest signal of America’s enduring moving-picture pride and the ultimate Pavlovian cue to moviegoers that two-hours of generally mindless escapism will immediately ensue? Just look at the Academy Award tally: Newman forty Nominations and nine Oscars; Bach zero. (True, the latter should have posthumously gotten the bullet-headed statuette for his laudable work on Silence of the Lambs.)

The next generation of Newmans is at the height of its powers. Nephew Randy approaches seventy and has twenty Academy award nominations to his credit; he’s won only twice, and not for scores, but rather for original songs. When he received the award in 2011 for his song for Toy Story 3 he joked that he was so often at the nominee dinner that the Academy had named a chicken dish after him. Busy in TV and video games and with a few less-than-distinguished features to his credit, Joey Newman represents the third generation of this film composing dynasty. He chose to take his mother’s family name for obvious reasons.

Alfred’s son Thomas Newman was born in 1955, educated at Yale, and already has ten Academy Award nominations, though in line with the low Newman family winning percentage he has yet to win the foolish thing. In a faintly just universe, his 2008 score for the Disney feel-bad-but-then-feel-good-in-spite-of-the-environemtnal-apocalypse WALL-E would have received the award. But no awards in this or any other universe are as arbitrary as the Oscar.

The first forty-five minutes of WALL-E follow the ceaseless diligence of an endearing binocular-eyed robot on a lifeless planet earth reduced to a landfill by human wastefulness. Since the first half of the movie is completely without dialogue, vast sonic space is cleared for Newman’s soundtrack. He makes the most of the opportunity to demonstrate a command of orchestral sonority as nuanced and imaginative as that of his father. The robot’s sense of wonder at the arrival of a spaceship is captured with the shimmering strings and oscillating harmonies beloved of film composers, but here enlivened with winking references to classics like Bizet’s Habanera and maybe even that very same Alfred Newman Fox fanfare. The younger Newman has a great sense of timing, one that must of necessity follow the dictates of the on-screen action. But his score bravely follows its own musical logic as well. No one sends out rushes of sound to collide with silence more dramatically than Newman. Even his rests make sense, something that cannot be said for many a soundtrack.

In his father’s era, the ability to allude to a wider repertory was also vital to film composers, but nowadays the poaching of elements from disparate musical styles is a prerequisite for success in a gourmandizing culture that starts pawing through the fridge for left-overs of yesterday’s feast before the plates heaped with today’s faddish fare have even been cleared from the table. The scene in which WALL-E goes on a first date with a sleek, white and apparently female robot steps around its own maudlin ooze thanks to Newman’s scoring of the encounter with a smoky shuffle and close-harmony doo-waps. Newman supplies the needed comic effect by surrounding an earnest android suitor and airy super model with the sonic haze of a retro 1970s lounge. But even here Newman does not drown in his own irony, but instead splashes happily about on its surface; among other life rings, it’s ardent Bacharach violins that keep the music afloat.

Ease with both the symphonic tradition and world music have equipped Thomas Newman to take up his latest and most ambitious mission: a James Bond soundtrack. Other illustrious film composers, Marvin Hamlisch and John Barry have preceded him. Barry rendered service to eleven of the Bond films, that is nearly half of the current total of twenty-three. Although Barry didn’t compose the theme song (that was done by Monty Norman), he did provide its distinctive sound – the dissonant brass chords, the lecherously distorted guitar riff, the slinky flutes, the bawdy trombones with plunger mutes. That immediately defined the martini swilling, dinner jacket-wearing toff flying around the world keeping its casinos, bars, and beaches safe for democracy. Here was a sound that conveyed chutzpah and cunning and encouraged, even more quickly than one of those martinis, the necessary suspension of disbelief in order to swoon before his literally lady-killing cool.

Each new Bond actor and each new Bond film is now accompanied by pr-driven talk of transformation. The pugilistic face of Daniel Craig certainly helps present an agent who’s been a few times around the bloc, both East and West. Craig’s status as a bona fide A-list leading man helps too. That the auteur Sam Mendes is in the director’s chair – or more frequently helicopter – lends class to the project: Mendes is a fellow Brit who came to Hollywood from the London theatre-world and with his first feature film, American Beauty of 1999, landed one of those Oscar I somehow keep referring to. Newman’s percussion-driven score for the movie was also nominated. American Beauty was pretentious and ponderous, and the music did nothing to relieve the suffocating aura of self-seriousness.

But the Mendes-Newman team certainly provides the kind of prestige that the hoary Bond franchise thinks it needs to trudge on in the post-Cold War era. Before we are even oriented in Skyfall and the sweaty danger of a hot-spot, third world locale in which it opens we get two shock chords which are meant to jolt the audience into knowing immediately that Bond is back and that the he’s still got it. With the sparsest of sonic means, Newman and Mendes literally trumpet their pledge that the brand is intact. Over the subsequent two hours kinetic chases using various kinds of vehicles – from motorcycles to subway cars – are separated from one another with set-piece speeches in which distinguished British actors pontificate about the lasting value of the old human methods of intelligence and espionage that are threatened with obsolescence in the digital age. These intervals of soporific calm are even more boring than they otherwise would because of the absence of music. At least there’s bad-guy Javier Bardem to have some campy fun with his lines. When Dame [!] Judi Dench’s M begins quoting Tennyson before a parliamentary panel, the Bond corporation might as well be appearing in creative bankruptcy court.

When allowed to, Newman’s score tries its best to keep this rambling wreck on the road. After that salvo of vintage chords from his predecessor Barry, Newman is given space after the credits to show his majestic talent by weaving in the sinuous and instantly recognizable Bond chromatic thread into expansive orchestral textures of his own. In Newman’s hands the Bondian motive becomes a kind of cantus firmus; he sneaks it in in one spot and brandishes it like a rocket-launcher in another. With each stop on Bond’s Condé Nast itinerary, Newman amps things with global rhythms, from the techno hustle in the dazzling nocturnal neon of modern Shanghai to the beach drums of what might be Bali. Newman keeps things moving along, but when, like Bond, his hands are tied and his music silenced you feel the movie slump forward in its chair.

The producers think the easiest way to cut him free is with the old gags: I suspect the Broccoli heiress (Barbara) and her half brother Michael Wilson are responsible for bringing the Aston Martin with machine guns hidden in the fender out of mothballs so 007 can road-trip it back to his ancestral manse called Skyfall with M, evil ex-agent Mr. Silver (Barden) close on their heals with an army of cinematic cannon fodder.

As soon as we see that silver sports car the soundtrack reverts to Barry’s Bond music in all its big band glory. This knowing ploy is meant to let is in on the irony of infinite regression: Craig playing the new Bond playing the old Bond. But it’s all been done before: the Aston Martin and the blaring brass have been de-mothballed for at least a couple installments from the Pierce Brosnan interregnum. That Newman is made in Skyfall to reheat the Barry’s classic material is hardly a humiliation – especially at the kind of fees Newman likely pulled in for his work. But it becomes immediately clear that what began with the fresh treatment of overused musical themes, ends in a rout of the new. It is telling that the soundtrack is the first to hoist the white flag of surrender to the imperatives of the brand. In the random darkness of this untethered romp, the music piped in from the past allows one to close the eyes, lean back, and think of an England that doesn’t even qualify as myth.

Dennis James hasn’t had a Halloween off in forty-three years. Given his mastery of the art of the cinema organ and the rich store of silent films appropriate to the ghoulish occasion, he’s unlikely to get a reprieve any year soon.

Even Super Storm Sandy couldn’t end his streak. His travel cased stocked with a sprawling musical score and a red-lined vampire cape, James flew through turbulent skies and against steep odds to make it to Cornell University’s Sage Chapel in Ithaca, New York by [last] Wednesday in time to accompany F. W. Murnau‘s Faust of 1926. From another cardinal direction came his musical partner for the evening: Mark Goldstein, virtuoso of the Buchla Lightning Wands. These implements take their name from the avant-garde inventor of electronic instruments, Don Buchla of Berkeley. They are about the size of sticks of dynamite and, when asked to do so, can pack a kindred sonic punch.

While the organ conjures an entire symphony from pipes of a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, the Buchla wands in Goldstein’s magic hands produce the thunder of timpani, the chanting of monks, the howling of wind – among countless other sonorities and effects. Like the spooky Theremin, which James hopped up from the organ bench to play at some of the more uncanny moments of a film bursting with uncanniness, these infrared-emitting wands convert gesture to music: the speed and direction of the hands moving through a magnetic field shape sound in the air. The ancient alchemist Faust would have liked the music that results from this instrument not just because of the universe of sounds it can make, but because of the truth it reveals: that the invisible is as real as the visible. Together, Goldstein and James call themselves the Filmharmonia Duo, and have toured the world – and elsewhere, judging by their penchant for the ethereal.

Born in 1950, James has been at the forefront of the revival of silent film organ accompaniment for more than four decades. He has held appointments as house-organist at many historic theatres across the United States and continues to be much in demand internationally. I first heard him play Buster Keaton‘s The General – which came out the same year as Murnau’s Faust – on the Wurlitzer organ at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto. James’ tremendous talent for matching musical figure and mood to on-screen action and emotion transformed the movie. One sees Keaton’s comedy in a new light when James plays it: not only was the comedy sharper and funnier, but cinematic time seemed to rush ahead, urged on by his exuberant music.

In a very different vein, James score to Lillian Gish‘s La Bohème (yet another film of 1926 – the silent cinema burning brightly in its last years) is a masterful exploration of the myriad tonalities of desire and affliction. When the aged Gish heard James’ music to her film, she told him, tears streaming down her face, that his was the score she’d always wanted for the work she considered her finest. Gish and James then toured for six years with the movie and his score before her death in 1993 at the age of ninety-nine.

James has dedicated his career in part to debunking the notion that the great cinema organists of the past simply made things up as they watched the film. Improvisation plays an important role in his art: patching in the transitions; chewing the scenery; or, in the most extreme cases, coming up with an entire score on the spot when the film itself doesn’t show up and another has to be found at the last minute. But these skills do not substitute for the careful creation a score. James is an avid researcher into the history of film music, and he has scoured studio archives for cue sheets and other evidence, which, when put into play, produce exacting and exhilarating music that is more than simply accompaniment, but instead, an inextricable companion to the images. Every time he does a silent movie, James proves again that there is a world of difference between the lax noodling, however gracious, of many a would-be silent film musician, and his own consummate professionalism and artistry. This is not to say his playing is at all pedantic. James’ ebullient personality expresses itself in a vigorously animated performing style, filled with perfectly placed musical exclamations points, bravura runs, quaking fortissimos, and exquisite pathos. His scores are fully formed artistic entities with room in the corners for the spontaneity that movies screened before a live audience demand.

Faust was Murnau’s last German film. By the time it was premiered in Berlin in 1926, the director was already in Hollywood working on Sunrise, the film most critics claim as his masterpiece. Faust was high budget and high concept, filled with novel cataclysmic effects: magic fire; super storms; self-writing books; and characters evaporating into thin air. There are tumultuous battles between good and evil, and flights across the sky and across time. Murnau’s cast was packed with the greatest European stars of the day – most famously Emil Jannings as Mephisto. One of Toulouse Lautrec‘s favorite subjects, the Moulin Rouge star, Yvette Guilbert appears as the bawdy aunt, who becomes besotted with Mephisto in an extended comic interlude towards the end of the film. Guilbert was more than a few years past her prime of the 1890s Parisian nights, but she and Jannings light things up with their own mutually augmenting electricity. The Expressionist sets – of steep-roofed cityscapes, Italian palaces, haunted moors, and Faust’s lugubrious study – are marvels of both precision and distortion, a nightmare version of Dürer.

For his score James has compiled a range organ classics and operatic transcriptions. The first half of the film relies on austere Baroque works to evoke Faust’s medieval world of plague, superstition, and fear. The furious aural assault of Buchla thunderbolts from Goldstein’s wands and the organ’s mighty chords ushered in the opening credits: the German inter-titles printed in pseudo-Gothic letters (with digital German subtitles), and the background antiqued with striations, as if Dürer had been sharpening his stylus on the celluloid. Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor (BWV 582) took on ominous dimensions as it trudged through the dying city, the plague devastating the populace as the result of the wager between the angel and devil in the movie’s prologue. Various fugal disquisitions eventually dragged us to the moral crossroads where Faust meets Mephisto and the two seal their nefarious pact in blood. James’ exhumes these organ classics with opportunistic flair, seguing impishly from Bach to Buxtehude and beyond. At the Cornell instrument James discovered previously unknown sonorities, from the ponderous to the plaintive. With the film’s candlelight glowing off rounded monkish faces, Goldstein’s wands sang the Passacaglia theme in lugubrious tones. Modern electronics made clear the initially altruistic motivations for the Faustian bargain.

The no-holds barred libertinage that soon following, with Mephisto transporting Faust to Italy to feast on the ample bosom of the Duchess of Parma, inspired a rampant bacchanal from the organ, full of runs as electrifying as the high voltage commentary from Goldstein’s hands.

The second half of the film, in which Faust pursues Gretchen, spurred James to a fantastically clever reworking and reimagining of themes from Gounod’s Damnation of Faust. Goldstein pitched in here, too, but was still busier with sound effects like Gretchen’s opening and closing of the jewelry box hiding the enchanted necklace given her by Faust. James milked every ounce of sympathy from the heart-rending prayer of Gretchen for her baby, shivering along with her in the snow. This was the calm before the final storm, when Faust is wrenched back from false youth and into old age. He then storms through the crowd watching Gretchen about to be burned at the stake for killing her baby.

Unsurpassed in his ability to pull a happy ending from even the most despairing of tragedies, Murnau concludes with a celestial battle between good and evil in which Faust and Gretchen are reunited in heaven. Mephisto therefore loses his opening wager. The updrafts from the pyre fueled the inexorably crescendo towards love’s ultimate triumph, sealed by a giant white-winged angel. The mighty blasts of organ and Buchla wands gave way to roaring Halloween applause from a packed church in rapturous appreciation of James and Goldstein’s unholy alliance. This Faust is in good hands, hugely skilled, but – just as important – brilliantly irreverent.